[Coco] Reporting SPAM

[Alan Jones]

Gene Heskett wrote:
> Alan Jones wrote:
>> My email address finally got discovered by the spamers.
>> Do any of you folks know of a way to create a script to automatically 
>> forward spam message headers to a specific email address? I use 
>> Thunderbird for my email program but I am willing to switch programs 
>> if there is something better. Thunderbird catches just about all 
>> spams sent to my inbox but I would like to be more pro-active in 
>> reporting this trash to my ISP and spam at uce.gov. It gets old doing 
>> the reporting manually.
>>
> Just delete it Alan. spam at uce.gov is a black hole.  If we sent 
> everything to them, I warrant the server would fill its petabyte drive 
> array daily.  FWDing that stuff just wastes even more bandwidth.
>
>> Alan
>>
>>
>
>

Well that is one possible way to look at the problem Gene. It chaps my 
hide that this trash is allowed to continue unabated. Someone, somehow 
has to put a stop to it. If ISP's would pro-actively attack this problem 
it could be solved. Reporting an unsolicited email to the senders ISP 
can help if and when the ISP enforces "their" spam policy. I am not an 
expert on this subject by no means. But I believe that if each mail 
server had strict rules of compliance it would be possible to weed out 
the spam, but it would take actual work by the mail server's owner/operator.

Let me give you an example from my packet radio sysop days as a ham 
radio operator. I used to run a packet radio bbs system on two meters 
(144.01 to 147.99 Mhz). Whenever mail was delivered to my system that 
was illegal or did not conform to standard protocol, I could contact the 
system that forwarded that mail/message to me and ask them kindly to 
filter out whatever was offensive. For example, the sysop could totally 
eliminate messages based on filtering scripts. You could filter out 
messages originating from one station or an entire region based on 
callsign or message header fields. Granted the amateur radio packet 
sysops had a "gentleman's" agreement to do this and cooperation was the key.

Now let us take this same approach and apply it to the internet email 
servers. Nowdays with modern computers and better software, it should be 
possible to have "adaptive filters" that learn as they process more and 
more email. This would take away some of the headache of manual 
filtering from the server owner/operator.

This is only a dream I have. I just wish it were true.

Take Care...
Alan